Mind is the Framework for Perception
Subjectivity, used here synonymously with consciousness, awareness, or knowing, is being-ness. It is the “I am” that is prior to any qualification.
Subjectivity is not a state of mind. States of mind, the content of experience, appear within subjectivity. This distinction is important to understand. As the fundamental reality, subjectivity is that by which everything is known.
However, in order to know the world, subjectivity requires a perceptual faculty through which to perceive. Subjectivity without perception is like an empty mirror, capable of reflecting anything but having no perceptual content of its own. So from the vantage point of subjectivity, prior to the mind, there are no perceptions, no objects in awareness, no representations. In other words, without the mind there is no experience of subject-object relationship.* There is only subjectivity’s infinite potential, the unmanifest ground of being.
The representations within the mind, the this and that, come into being through perceptions, thoughts, feelings and sensations. When we look at a tree, light waves are filtered through through the mind, which creates an image of the tree. The tree seems to be a separate reality from ourselves and from other objects, but the fundamental reality is the subjectivity in which it appears. This is a key step in the nondual understanding which is explored in further detail throughout these pages.
(The next step in understanding is to allow for the possibility that subjectivity is universal, that your consciousness and my consciousness are not two separate consciousness. Rather, private inner experiences are an activity of the mind, a localized limitation within pure subjectivity. So while I may not have access to your mental state, and you may not have access to mine, that which knows mental states is the source of both. Subjectivity is the substance, so to speak, from which all perceptions are made.)
By recognizing the mind’s role in perception, we have the opportunity to see beyond the appearances of separation to the reality of all that is.